Chapter 7496 Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
“Now?”
Charlie’s words left even the highly intelligent Maria a little confused.
He asked Charlie with a puzzled expression, “Young Master, it’s winter in Antarctica now. Isn’t there no ship that can sail through the Roaring Forties?”
Charlie smiled and said, “I didn’t say we were going to take a boat home.”
Maria was even more shocked and couldn’t help but ask, “Then, do we have to take a plane back? It would probably be difficult for a regular plane to take off and land on the Antarctic ice sheet.”
Charlie shook his head mysteriously and said with a smile, “Not by plane either.”
Maria felt strange. There were only two routes back to Aurous Hill from Antarctica: sea and air. But Charlie said that wasn’t the case. Could there be another possibility?
At that very moment, he suddenly remembered the teleportation array that Charlie had used to bring him in, and exclaimed in great shock, “Young Master, could it be that there is another teleportation array here that allows us to leave the Antarctic Continent?!”
Charlie looked at Maria with a happy expression. He knew Maria was smart, but she always surprised him.
He couldn’t help but exclaim, “Miss Lin is really smart; she guessed it right away!”
Maria smiled humbly and said, “Young master, you overpraise me. The reason I was able to guess that it was a teleportation array was mainly because you personally experienced it with me just now. Otherwise, even if I thought about it for three days and three nights, I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out.”
Charlie laughed and said, “Isn’t it just a matter of intelligence?”
After saying that, Charlie continued, “Miss Lin guessed correctly. There are nine teleportation arrays in this place, each corresponding to one of nine different places on Earth, basically spread across all continents. I will take Miss Lin back to China first. After you and I move Madam Pu Cha from Zijin Manor, I will take you to try the other teleportation arrays.”
Maria nodded enthusiastically with joy, saying, “I can’t wait!”
Charlie clasped his hands, and the teleportation array of the entire underground city appeared in his mind. The Four Directions Pagoda had nine floors, and each floor had a teleportation array. The Bagua diagram that could teleport to all corners of the world was located on the fifth floor of the Four Directions Pagoda.
As for the contents of the other eight levels of the Four Directions Pagoda, Charlie didn’t have time to explore them all before returning to the research station, so he planned to study them slowly after returning from Aurous Hill this time.
Just by silently reciting the fifth-level incantation of the Four Directions Pagoda’s teleportation array, Charlie and Maria appeared in the Eight Trigrams Compass space from that day in the blink of an eye.
Maria, who was well versed in the I Ching and the Eight Trigrams, exclaimed in surprise after seeing the eight halos in the directions of Kan, Gen, Zhen, Xun, Li, Kun, Dui, and Qian: “These eight halos in various directions must be teleportation arrays to various parts of the world, right?”
Charlie nodded and pointed to the circle of light in the center, then said to Maria, “There are nine teleportation arrays in total, but only the one in the center is in China. If we want to return to Aurous Hill, we have to go through this teleportation array to China first, and then find a way to get there.”
Maria asked him, “Does young master know which region of China this teleportation array leads to?”
Charlie said, “Western Sichuan, Crane Crying Mountain.”
Maria nodded with a look of sudden realization and sighed, “Mount Heming does make sense. It’s the birthplace of Taoism and must be a sacred land for cultivators. Perhaps cultivators from before the Dharma-Lattering Era attained enlightenment and entered the Tao on Mount Heming.”
Charlie nodded, his brows furrowed slightly, and said, “There’s just one thing I don’t understand.”
Maria looked at him and said, “Please speak, young master, and I will try to answer your questions.”
Charlie took her hand and led her to the circle of light in the center, saying solemnly, “Let’s talk while we walk.”
A moment later, the two appeared in a special cave on the Crane Cry Mountain.
Having shown composure during the previous two teleportations, Maria, holding his hand, skillfully guided him out of the cave.
As they walked, Charlie voiced his doubts to Lin: “Miss Lin, I’ve researched some history. The origins of Taoism should be around 140 AD, which is less than two thousand years ago. If what we now call Taoism is the ancestor of all cultivation, then the entire history of cultivation is only a little over a thousand years, less than two thousand years. And through Master Meng’s life story, we can roughly determine that in 664 AD, when Master Meng was born, the world had entered the Dharma-Lattering Age. This means that from the beginning of cultivation to the arrival of the Dharma-Lattering Age, it was only a short span of five hundred years. But Master Meng lived for a thousand years. For many high-level cultivators, their lifespans were probably even longer. How could this short span of five hundred years possibly accommodate the cultivation and inheritance of several generations of cultivators?”
After hearing Charlie’s question, Maria thought for a moment and asked him: “Young Master, the history of human civilization is only 5,000 years. Do you think that 5,000 years can accommodate the development of the cultivation path?”
Charlie thought for a moment and said seriously, “Based on my current understanding of cultivation, I’m afraid I’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. That’s why I’ve always felt that the history of cultivation must have taken a very long time to evolve. Let alone the 500 years we just estimated, even if it were truly 5,000 years, it doesn’t seem like enough time for cultivation to go through several epochs of evolution, from its birth to its rise, then to its rapid development, and then through its decline and the end of the Dharma Era. If we look at it from the perspective of Earth’s development history, a single epoch might take tens of millions of years.”
Maria smiled and nodded, then said, “Modern human civilization, under the natural environment of Earth, can probably only survive for a few hundred thousand years. After a few hundred thousand years, all traces of human development will probably disappear. Therefore, in the billions of years of Earth’s history, if a civilization that focused primarily on cultivation really existed, even if they possessed great supernatural powers, the traces they could leave behind after the passage of time would probably be very few.”
By that time, the two had reached the outside of the cave, hand in hand. Maria turned around and saw the rocks that had left no trace. She was amazed by the magical technique and suddenly realized something.
While admiring the beauty of the lush, long-lost mountains, Maria suddenly realized something and said to Charlie, “I understand! Although the manifestations left behind by the great supernatural power are very small, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist at all. There must still be some…